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Saturday, June 14, 2014

#71: Kingdom Hearts 2: Why Does It Irk Me?

Kingdom
Hearts 2 is to be re-released on the PlayStation 3, along with
several other games in the franchise in Kingdom Hearts 2.5 Re:
Mix. As a direct result of this, I have begun discussing the game
with some friends of mine in anticipation. This can sometimes lead to
conflict. You see, I am a huge fan of the Kingdom Hearts franchise.
Despite that, I have very mixed opinions of Kingdom Hearts 2.
Although I generally enjoyed the game, I also feel that it was where
the series started to accumulate many of the problems commonly
associated with the series. For this reason, I consider it to be one
of the weaker games in the franchise. This is seen as strange to many
fans of the series, perhaps rightfully so. However, I do have my
reasons for thinking this.

My first
such reason is the apparently lack of gravity in the world. To be
clear, this is not referring to emotion gravity. Rather, I am
referring to the physical force which pulls people downward. Kingdom
Hearts 2 came out at a very interesting time in Square-Enix's
history. This was the period when the company stared leaning towards
the more “cinematic” approach to game design. Sometime during the
production of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, SE began to
try to make their games more movie-like. Though I can only speculate,
this is what I suspect is behind the “Reaction Commands” present
in the second entry of Kingdom Hearts. For the unaware, this was the
system of contextual, God of War-style QTE prompts, all mapped to the
triangle button. Often, these “Reactions” would result in
bombastic and over-the-top action sequences in major boss battles.

This had
two effects on the game's fundamental feeling. First, it reduced the
level of interactivity inherent to the game. Instead of using the
game's combat system to do battle, the game would occasionally make
players take a break at certain points in a given boss fight in order
keep pressing the triangle button so that a cutscene can play,
transitioning to the next phase of the boss fight.

The
second, and more important effect, is that it took away the weight
the combat in the original Kingdom Hearts game had. This is one of
those intangibles that crop up in game design. In the first game in
the franchise, there was a very real sense of weight when fighting.
Though players could stay in the air for fairly long, there was a
sense that a force was always pulling them back to the ground. It
felt like Sora and company were doing the fantastic things that they
do despite being weighted down by the forces of nature.

Contrast
that with Kingdom Hearts 2, and that sense is nearly gone. The QTEs,
especially later in the game, have Sora and his friends no longer
bound by the laws of reality. We see them cutting down skyscrapers in
a single slash, punching boulders into enemies, and staying in the
air for so long that they can practically fly. Rather than being
bound by the forces of nature, they seem more like demi-gods, capable
of feats far beyond anything that seems remotely plausible even in
the context of a Disney/Final Fantasy crossover. Again, this is
difficult to explain in words. It is far easier to just ask you to
watch theseclips of combat scenarios in each game, and compare how
they feel. You can just sense how float-y and bombastic Kingdom
Hearts 2 feels to its predecessor, removing the weight of its combat
and world.

The
other reason Kingdom Hearts 2 earns a fair degree of my ire is the
writing. I know for a fact I am going to get a lot of grief for this:
However, the second main game in the franchise is where, in my humble
opinion, that the series began to develop many of the issues people
typically associate with it. To fully understand this, I would like
to once again return to the original Kingdom Hearts. Kingdom Hearts
1's story was, as befitting its Disney-inspired roots, a relatively
simple tale of the struggle of light versus darkness. Villains in the
story has relatively simple motivations, if they even have any
motivations at all. The heroes are very clearly in the right when it
comes to most situations. And at the end of the day, the bad guy is
defeated and the world is saved thanks to the power of friendship.
Cliche as it is, the story works for the most part. It is consistent
in tone, fits well with the subject material and, most importantly,
makes logical sense to players of the game.

Kingdom
Hearts 2 does not always meet all of these conditions. The biggest
hit that it took in the narrative department was in the introduction
of far too many elements to the overall plot of the series. This game
introduced the concept Nobodies, creatures composed of the body and
soul of people who lost their hearts to darkness. To that end, the
writers created a group called Organization XIII, which is a group of
thirteen (or less) people who have lost their hearts and became
Nobodies. Then, it introduced that these people, without hearts,
cannot feel human emotion. At the same time, their behavior seems to
indicate that they feel emotions, but the game says it is a crude
facsimile of actual emotions. Further, we learn that the antagonist
of the previous game was an impostor who took someone else's name and
that his nobody is the leader of the organization. We also
learn that there are special nobodies formed from special
circumstances, that have special powers because of those
circumstances.

None of
this is particularly hard to explain one piece at a time. The
difficult stems from having to store the gestalt of all this
information in memory. So much stuff needs explaining that I usually
defer friends who ask to the Kingdom Hearts Wiki. Later games would
build on this database to the point where it is hard to talk about
any one element of the franchise's overarching story without first
going into at least ten different other concepts. Eschewing the
Disney-inspired simplicity of the original title, this was the point
where Kingdom Hearts began to favor the style of writing more
associated with the Final Fantasy side of this crossover. The game
simply bogged itself down too much in the details, losing part of
what I found charming in the original game.

And in
the bogging down lies a bit of irony. While the overarching story had
a lot going on in Kingdom Hearts 2, the plots for the individual
worlds were much lazier in their writing. Though there are one or two
exceptions to this rule, by and large the story-line of a given world
is ripped wholesale from the Disney film the world in based on. Only
instead of just the hero of the film, it is the hero and three people
(Sora, Donald, and Goofy). This results in narratives that really
make the protagonists of them look dumb.

One of
the most egregious examples of this comes from the Atlantica level,
representing The Little Mermaid. In the first game, the story is much
more about Sora, Donald, and Goofy trying to blend into the world
under the sea. The three have to stay incognito so that they can find
and seal the keyhole, saving Atlantica from impending doom.
Characters from the Little Mermaid are true to their personalities in
the film. However, the story is squarely written around Sora and
company. In the end, they discover Ursula is planning to use King
Triton's trident to take over Atlantica and stop her in order to gain
the trust of the world's inhabitants, neatly resolving all the issues
brought up in that scenario.

Fast
forward to Kingdom Hearts 2, and Atlantica is again a world in the
game. Rather than build off the relationships and aftermath of what
happened in the first game, the writers decided to just retell the
tale of The Little Mermaid, as seen in the Disney classic. (And yes,
I am going to ignore the whole “musical level” element to this.
It is annoying, but not important to my overall point.) Despite
establishing that Ursula is an evil villain in the first game, Ariel
still blindly accepts her offer for help, as she did in the movie,
without even thinking for a moment about the consequences. This might
make sense if they had pretended that Sora never visited Atlantica in
the original Kingdom Hearts. However, when the player first arrives,
the initial cutscene acknowledges the friendship Ariel forged with
Sora in Kingdom Hearts 1. Nobody even calls her out on her blatant
stupidity. Beyond sheer laziness on the part of the scenario
designers, there is not much of an excuse for this in a game that
took five years to develop in the PS2-era.

Ultimately,
all this together leads me to appreciate the original game more than
Kingdom Hearts 2. Before I wrap up, I want to point out that none of
this makes Kingdom Hearts 2 a bad game. It is a very solid action-RPG
that I would wholehearted recommend. It is good even by the standards
set by other games in the series. It is simply that I feel it began
this trend in the franchise that I do not like. That is why I wrote
this article and why, despite my liking the game, I cannot help but
be bothered by it.

1 comment:

Man that jumping through the air reminds me of Metal Gear Rising: revengeance, except in MGR:R instead of dramatic battle music they have japanese hair metal with a guy screaming about something as a ninja cyborg jumps from missile to missile. Which makes the whole thing incredibly stupid yet cool or stupicool.